Sunday, July 29, 2007

KING SUNNY ADE -- “Eje Nlo Gba Ara Mi”, “365 Is My Number/The Message” (from Juju Music, Mango, 1982), “Synchro System” (Synchro System, Mango, 1983)The riff so good they used it thrice. Actually, that’s an underestimate. This twangy, twinkly rhythm guitar figure, mostly likely played by Ade himself, is all over The Best of The Classic Years compilation of 1967-74 material (notably “Sunny Ti De” and “Ibanujde Mon Iwon”), and I’m told it recurs throughout the man’s vast discography. Whether it’s creative thrift or a Zen-like exploration of the infinite inflectional possibilities within a few chords, who knows? In any given track, this crisp crinkle of scintillating Afro-funk serves a double function, operating as both audio-logo (this is KING SUNNY ADE you’re listening to) and intensifier, its flecked flicker tightening the surface of the music until it’s as taut as a drum skin.

NASTY HABITS--“Shadow Boxing” (31 Records, 1996)Nasty Habits is the alter-ego of deejay/producer Doc Scott, one of jungle’s under-sung pioneers, and “Shadow Boxing” contains the most gloriously doom-laden and ponderous synth-riff in that genre’s history. Scott’s from Coventry, so it’s tempting to think he must have accessed the heaviness of this sluggish, scowling riff from the harsh West Midlands environment in the same way Sabbath did with “Iron Man,” “War Pigs,” and the rest. More likely, though, is that in the early Nineties Scott had his head rearranged at Coventry’s Eclipse raves and ever since then he’s been chasing down his own ultimate version of the miasmic “Mentasm” noise-riff, as heard on Joey Beltram’s early R&S tracks and Belgian hardcore anthems beyond counting. Beautiful and ominous like a cloud of poison gas looming on the horizon, “Shadow Boxing” is the culmination of a life’s work. Something drum’n’bass as genre most likely will never surpass.

RESILIENT--"1.2" (Chain Reaction, 1996)There’s probably any number of fabulous riffs strewn across the discographies of the Basic Channel/Chain Reaction label-cluster (Maurizio’s “M6” and Monolake’s “Index” spring immediately to mind). But “1.2” by the enigmatic Resilient takes the BC/CR approach of miniaturising the riff to the limit. Riffs exist at the intersection of melody and rhythm, the mnemonic and the physical, and the Chain Reaction aesthetic in part involved seeing just how reduced (in terms of notes) you could make a pulse before it became purely percussive, just another beat. I’m not even sure there’s notes as such in “1.2”, it’s more like this spasming ripple of texture. It’s as if Resilient has conducted an archaeology of house music in order to uncover the primordial geocosmic vamp at the genre’s core. The first half of “1.2” consists of a tectonic shudder, a tidal current, that’s so contourless it’s at the very threshold of memorability. Then roughly six minutes in (you do tend to lose track of time) it abruptly shifts gear to a more rapid flicker of amorphous radiance. At which point, the sensation of spongy amniotic suspension quickens to a flooding bliss, overwhelming enough to get your eyes rolling back in your head. You start to see why some wag* dubbed this genre “heroin house”.

KRAFTWERK--“Ruckzuck” (Kraftwerk 1, Philips, 1971)Given all the other choices available in the Kraftwerk oeuvre--the regular-as-carburetor pulse of “Autobahn”, the poignant heart-flutter vamps of “Neon Lights” and “Computer Love”, the eerie synth-shivers midway through "Home Computer"--it probably seems slightly perverse to pick the very first song on the very first album. Especially as the killer riff is played on a flute, not a synth. But the whole essence of Kraftwerk’s sound/feeling/Geist--serene urgency, Zen as the art of motorik maintenance--is distilled into Florian Schneider’s rasping flute lick. Or flute licks--at various points, it’s double-tracked so that Schneider is jamming with himself, the staccato patterns dovetailing to funky perfection. Flutes are usually a ghastly idea outside classical music, but here the instrument rocks--indeed, it’s hard to think of another instance of a woodwind being used to such percussive and propulsive effect. “Ruckzuck” is the missing link between Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Area Code 615’s “Stone Fox Chase”--i.e. that harmonica-driven theme tune for The Old Grey Whistle Test.

* "some wag"--Not sure but I think it was actually Kevin Martin who coined the term "heroin house". Nuff respeck.

During the last decade, Kraftwerk have been absent but omnipresent. You can hear their ghostly presence in house and techno, in the lovelorn electro of New Order and the inorganic sound-palatte of industrial disco. Rap groups don't cite or sample them so much these days, but in the early Eighties Kraftwerk were as crucial as James Brown. Long before Afrika Bambatta's JB collaboration "Unity", the affinity between "Sex Machine" and "Man Machine" was obvious (the arid, arduous pursuit of bliss-through-monotony). More outlandishly, Kraftwerk were a huge influence on the hymnal mantras of Spacemen 3's Playing With Fire. Then again, Kraftwerk always namechecked the Stooges/MC5/Suicide/Velvets axis as their taste in rock).

But for a group whose image is of a sound-factory manned by technocrats who devoutly believe arbeit macht frei, Kraftwerk themselves have been curiously unproductive. Since 1981's Computer World, all that's come off the Kling Klang assembly line has been the "Tour de France" 12 inch and 1986's not-major Electric Cafe LP. A few months ago, a "new" Kraftwerk albumwas released in the States, with little fanfare. The Mix (Elektra)was a retrospective, but it didn't embalm its 11 "classic tracks" in their original period charm, and it didn't come complete with a hefty,hagiographical booklet (c.f. James Brown's Star Time box). This was Kraftwerk as living legacy. The songs have been drastically overhauled, the melodic arrangements stripped down and welded to contemporary rhythmic chassis (emphasising both the present's debt to Kraftwerk's futurism, and the group's right to compete in today'sb.p.m. marketplace). "Durability is a central concept in art," K-werk leader Ralf Hutter has proclaimed. "Our sounds and programmes are immortal. Thanks to the computer someone else will be able to continue what we are doing."

Soon Kraftwerk will be here in (impersonal)person, playing their first NYC show in ten years at the Beacon Theatre on September 20.* I caught them in London a few months back, and it was a strange experience. The crowd was a weird mix of fashion-conscious, post-acid house ravers plus Kraftwerk's original nerdish constituency, traditionally known by the shorthand epithet "physics student". Weirder still was the fervour and affection with which the Teutonic technocrats were receieved, like homecoming heroes. Live, Kraftwerk compensate for their static sobriety and the inherent unphysicality of computer-based music, with a spectacular stage set. Their banks of consoles are fronted by fluorescent light-tubes,like the bars of an electric fire; there are back-projected films (b/w footage of cyclists for "Tour de France", freeways for "Autobahn" -literal rather than lateral stuff, you dig); as the piece de resistance , automated doppelgangers of the band are unveiled for "The Robots", to perform a rather stilted ballet.

Immaculately groomed, dispassionate and perspiration-free, Kraftwerk still transgress most of the precepts of rock'n'roll. But the boys do crack a grin or two during "Pocket Calculator", and even "jam" together, improvising on hand-held mini-synths whose keys each cue a different motif or synth-riff. Sweat-less they may be, but soul-less? No way. Just check the sweeping poignancy of those arrangments (midway between systems music and Brian Wilson, one of their major influences). Swoon to the obliterating pathos of "Computer Love", with its heart-murmur bassline, swirling synth-constellations and lachrymose lines about looking for "a data date".

Still, anonymity and monumentalism are what Kraftwerk are all about, and personally I welcome a dose of that, as a blessed reprieve from the surfeit of "real music" and "true grit" showered upon us from every corner (from the indie scene to VH1, there's too many human beings round here). "Trans Europe Express" remains their tour de force. With its girder beats and indefatigible pace, its arching synths thatrush over your head in simulation of the Doppler Effect, this track really does evoke the spiritual dimension of industrialism. Kraftwerk stir up nostalgia for the days when we thought technology would liberate us, when we beleived the city of the future would be planned and pristine. Nowadays, we know the city of the future is Mexico City or Bombay). Live, and on The Mix, the track develops into the astonishing "Metal On Metal", a funky iron foundry that puts Einsturzende Neubautenon the good foot. As Britcrit David Stubbs wrote of Faust, Kraftwerk are just specks on their own landscape. Faceless, flesh-less,and fantastic.

*the US tour was cancelled, which is probably why this piece never ran. When they did finally tour America in 1998, I caught one of their New York dates--truly one of the most amazing shows I've seen.

BONUS QUOTES

"The dynamism of the machines, the 'soul' of the machines, has always been a part of our music. Trance always belongs to repetition, and everybody is looking for trance in life--in sex, in the emotional, in pleasure, in parties... So, the machines produce an absolutely perfect trance"--Ralf Hutter

"The mechanical universe of Kraftwerk has been cloned or copied in Detroit, Brussels, Milan, Manchester, and even psychedelicized by the delirium ofhouse music. You can define it as you want: sci-fi music, techno-disco, cybernetic rock. But the term I prefer even so is robot pop. It fits in with our objective--which consists of working without a respite toward the construction of the perfect pop song for the tribes of the global village"-- Ralf Hutter

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

What is it about Alan Warner and the lassies? Morvern Callar, his first novel, was written from the point-of-view of a 21 year old supermarket girl from a remote Scottish port, and followed her pleasure-principled journey through the Meditteranean rave scene. His latest, The Sopranos, goes five better, recounting 24 hours in the life of a gang of convent schoolgirls from the same sea town--a more eventful day-and-night than normal, for the girls are travelling to the Scottish capital to participate in a national choir contest. But instead of the honor of the school, Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, the main concern of these 17 year old miscreants is losing--to ensure that they won't have to stay in Edinburgh for the next round of the competition, but can return home in time to visit the local Mantrap nightclub, where sailors on shore leave are hotly anticipated. The trip to the big city does have its attractions, though, allowing the girls to indulge their passions for alcohol, clothes shopping, flirting--opportunities they seize with such lusty ferocity that catastrophe, albeit of a richly comic sort, is inevitable.

34 year old Warner dotes on these girls. There's something blatantly vicarious about the way he revels in their salty repartee and bawdy imaginations, something close to envy in the way he admires their cameraderie, quick wit, and impulsiveness. Fionnula the Cooler, the most charismatic and self-aware of the gang, expresses their philosophy: "any opportunity we get in life, you should just GO for it. Grab ah it' . Occassionally Warner pauses the narrative for full-on exaltation: "They've youth; they'll walk it out like a favorite pair trainers. It's a poem this youth ... We should get shoved aside cause they have it now, in glow of skin and liquid clarity of deep eye on coming June nights and cause it will go... After all what do we amount to but a load of old worn-out shoes?" .

The Sopranos reminds me of the key lyric from "Common People" by the British pop group Pulp, a song that deals with the middle class's voyeuristic fascination for working class vitality: "they burn so bright and you can only wonder why." With the Sopranos, you don't have to ponder too hard about the whys and wherefores of their incandescence. Sparks fly from the friction between these girls's boundless hormonal energy and the multiple obstacles they face--oppressions of age, class, gender, and region (they live in a provincial backwater of a country, Scotland, that is itself subordinated within the UK). Early in the book, the sopranos run into a former classmate, Michelle, who quit school pregnant after a one-night stand with a sailor. Warner writes poignantly about the awkwardness of the encounter, as the girls sense their old friend now dwells on the other side of a definite boundary: her life is effectively over, "she'd devoured the few opportunities for the wee bit sparkle that was ever going to come her way."

Rather less subtly, Warner positions the girls as renegades against the gerontocratic, eros-denying regime of the convent school: they are pure instinct and raw sensuality struggling to express itself through the only avenues left by the frigid, dessicated nuns--secretly shortening the length of their regulation tartan skirts, wearing colorful shoelaces. This theme of Catholic girls as volcanoes of pent-up libido (27-and-counting girls at the school get pregnant that year) is hackneyed, but it doesn't stop Warner from overplaying it. It's one of a handful of false notes in The Sopranos--the implausibly hip music taste of one the girls, Kylah (although it's nowhere near as suspiciously male-thirtysomething-Wire-reader-like as >Morvern Callar's), and a lesbian love sub-plot that reads as a distinctly masculine fantasy.

Quibbles aside, the overpowering feeling this reader gets from The Sopranos is verimisimilitude. Warner has the sharpest ear for dialogue this side of his compatriot Irvine Welsh. The way he captures the rhythms of girl-talk--the ping-pong rallies, swerves, nonsequiturs and explosions of mirth--suggest he's spent a lot of time eavesdropping in McDonalds or hanging around school playgrounds. As with Welsh's novels, The Sopranos is rich both in pungent slang ("beastie" = penis, "pissed mortal" = very drunk, " "dinnae scum us out" is roughly equivalent to the Valley girl's "gag me with a spoon") and in regional dialect ("greeting" means crying, "ceilidh" is a chat, "oxters" are armpits), which are almost always cleverly deployed so the reader can work out the meaning from the context. Like Morvern Callar, the whole book is written in vernacular Scottish, with phonetic spellings. The difference is that the first novel was all from Morvern's point of view, whereas The Sopranos has an omniscent narrator who speaks like the girls, only more self-consciously poetic. Although this creates vivid language--"there was a bit of silentness," neologisms like "gigglestifled"--it can also come across forced. The incessant spelling of "and" as "an" and "of" as "o" can be irritating, and Warner's impulse to simulate the non-grammatical shorthand of how real people really speak (dropping of definite articles and prepositions) makes some descriptive paragraphs feel stilted; the prose freezes up, the eye glides over them.

Ultimately, The Sopranos is neither social realism (it's not hum-drum or uneventful enough) nor magic realism (despite some heavy-handed symbolism involving an escaped Venuezalan parrot), but something in between. It's about the strangeness of ordinary people and the absurdist poetry of everyday life. In some ways, it's less a narrative than a concatenation of great anecdotes, the sort of embellished and exaggerated stories you might pick up in a pub and pass on, the tale growing in the telling: mad things such-and-such a person did when drunk, bizarre incidents that befell a friend-of-a-friend. In Morvern Callar, the heroine notes how the middle-class publishing people she meets in London never tell stories, they discuss ideas. Like the other inhabitants of their town, the sopranos love telling tales; you sense that the mischief and mayhem they get up to in this action-packed, alcohol-soaked 24 hours is entering their collective mythology even as it happens. Compared with the oddly bleak hedonism of Morvern Callar, The Sopranos is remarkably upbeat. Despite the ever present sense of youth's transience and the looming shadow of the socio-economic odds stacked against the girls, the book ends on a high note. Unlike Trainspotting, it won't need to have its ambivalences ironed out to be transformed into the feel-good youth movie it's clearly destined to be.

Once upon a time, a band from the North came with a sound so fresh and vigorous it took the nation by storm. The sound was rock (the bog-standard indie-schmindie format of guitars/ bass/ drums) but crucially it was pop too: concise, punchy, murderously melodic, shiny without being “plastic”. The singer was a true original, delivering a mixture of sensitivity and strength, defiance and tenderness, via a regionally-inflected voice that stood out amid the fake-American accents of the era. The young man’s lips spilled forth words that were realistic without being dour, full of sly, salty humour and beautifully observed detail, plangent with poignancy. Oh, the debut faced quibbles from some who felt the earlier versions--those that had incited the monster buzz in the first place--were definitive and superior. But most recognized the album as a landmark, an instant classic. And then came the doubt: how can they possibly follow it?

I’m talking about the Smiths, of course. But the narrative totally fits a more recent group from the other side of the Pennines. Okay, it was Radio One evening show sessions rather than Myspace that built the Mozz buzz, but otherwise the parallels are striking, right down to the mad flurry of non-album singles and EPs and brill B-sides, scattered with heedless generosity as if to say “aren’t we the fecund fuckers, eh?” The similarity extends to my initial encounter with Favourite Worst Nightmare, which gave me an eerie flashback to the disappointment of first hearing Meat Is Murder (hardly a song from which made Uncut’s recent Best of the Smiths poll). Nightmare’s sound is bright, brash, brimming with vim, but hardly any of the tunes hit the bulls-eye, either melodically or emotionally. As for the words, they felt like “Rusholme Ruffians” and “Nowhere Fast” all over again--that same impression of a writer who shot his wad--a lifetime’s worth of feeling and watching--copiously the first time around and was now coming up empty.

A couple more plays put paid to any worries on the songfulness front: these tunes will dog your every waking hour. Stronger still is the sheer élan and force of the playing. Even with the loss of their original bassist, Arctic Monkeys still possess the most dynamic and supple UK rhythm section since Stone Roses. The band’s power and agility at times resembles an Oasis fixated on Led Zeppelin rather Beatles. “Indie” is an inadequate and misleading term for this band, probably the only one of their peer group(s) capable of making a decent fist of “Black Dog.” Sometimes you even get the slight sense that these twisty-turny, multi-segmented songs, full of stop-and-starts and lane-switches, are actually designed to show off their musicianship. They are also showcases for Alex Turner’s voice, as instrument as nimble, verve-full and blastingly potent as the guitar, bass and drums. What comes across even clearer on Nightmare than the debut is the sheer groove power of this band--the lithe swagger of “Teddy Picker”, the swinging hi-hats and low-rider bass of “D Is For Dangerous”-- which goes back to the funk outfit Judan Suki that Turner and drummer Matt Helders operated in parallel with the fledgling Arctics.

Four plays convinced me that Favourite Worst Nightmare was a near-triumph, a far superior Album #2 than Meat Is Murder, The Libertines, or Second Coming. Yet doubts nagged. The songs are often hard to connect with emotionally, partly because the lyrics are more oblique and clotted with Costello-like cleverness than last time but partly because of the subject matter. There’s a slight suspicion that a fair few of the tunes are inspired by the (yaaaaawn) travails of instant megafame. Take opener “Brianstorm”: over riffs that whir like the rotating blades of an abbatoir, Turner fires off glib and flashy (if funny) lines taking the piss out of some cooler-than-thou rockstar type they’ve evidently rubbed shoulders with these last 18 months--“top marks for not trying”, “bless us with your effortlessness” “we can’t take our eyes/off your T-shirts and ties/ combination”, climaxing with the terrific kiss-off “see you later, innovator”. Next up is “Teddy Picker”, mining a similar grinding bluesy feel to “Fake Tales of San Francisco” and a similar tone of derision, except this time round the butt seems to be rock journalists: “Dya reckon they mek ‘em tek an oath that says ‘we are defenders/of any poseurs or professional pretenders around’?”, ponders Turner before letting rip with another deliciously snarled killer-blow, “already thick and yer getting thicker.” I’m not totally sure who or what is the “dirty little herbert” in song #3 “D Is For Dangerous” but after this third-song-in-a-row delivered at the same pitch of scorn and sarcasm, it’s hard to care. On the album’s “second side” “If You Were There, Beware” provokes similar ennui: a chip off the same block as “Perhaps Vampires Is A Bit Strong,” it lambasts “ambitiously vicious” muck-raking hacks grubbing for a kiss-and-tell story and harassing the star’s old sweethearts (“can’t you sense she was never meant to fill column inches?”). But here at least your interest is sustained by the inventive song-structure, which runs through around half-a-dozen distinct sections and twice as many guitar timbres, and again recalls “Vampires” with its heavy-rock feel.

Other songs suffer from being opaque. It’s hard to grasp the scenario in “Balaclava,” which might be about a rapist or someone pretending to be a rapist as part of a kinky sex-game. The tune does flit nicely however between bittersweet-Smiths and big-and-bashy Zep modes. “Fluorescent Adolescent” tells of that “very common crisis,” the spice going out of your sex life (“the Bloody Mary’s lacking the Tabasco”, as Turner puts it), which in this case causes the frustrated girl to pine for some hit-and-run lover from her past (“the boy’s a slag… the best you ever had”) as an escape from drab coupledom/dreary coupling. The Smiths are overwhelming present here (the melody-pang of the line “you took a left off Last Laugh lane” is virtually a sample from “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”) and on the next song “Only One Who Knows,” whose luminous guitar-tone recalls “Back to the Old House,” while Turner’s pre-rock’n’roll croon is only inches from Tommy Steele smarm.

The best things on Nightmare are the most lyrically direct. Like “Do Me A Favour,” a break-up song set--as with the first album’s best tune, “Red Light…”--in a car, Turner’s eye for vivid detail (“tears on the steering wheel, dripping on the seat”) in full effect. “This House Is A Circus” switches from the thrilling assonance of “this house is a circus/berserk as fuck” to the yearning chorus “we’re forever unfulfilled/and can’t think why”. Finally the home stretch sees Nightmare open up with the emotional clarity of “The Bad Thing”, “Old Yellow Bricks” and “505”. The first is a song about infidelity riding a galloping sound of Beatles-like ebullience, with Turner as the sorely tempted lad struggling to resist offers from a girl who promises that her boyfriend’s “not the jealous type”. “Old Yellow Bricks” bounces on a marvelously stubby and stompy funk riff and depicts a slacker type who’s wasting his life, a “fugitive” who doesn’t know what he’s “running away from”. It’s a scathing yet sympathetic portrait, especially at the plangent chorus “he wants to sleep in a city that never wakes up/blinded by nostalgia”. “505” is about Turner’s own homesickness, the number referring perhaps to a post code or a street address, an internal summons to hearth and sweetheart that must be heeded whether “it’s a seven hour flight or a 45 minute drive” away.

Expertly executed and supremely assured, albeit tinged here and there with a hint of hollow, Favourite Worst Nightmare isn’t going to make Arctic Monkeys any smaller in the scheme of things. They remain the best ensemble of guitar-toting tunesmiths to emerge from the UK this decade. While I’d be surprised if anyone, five years on, cared about this record as much as the first one, I await their Queen Is Dead keenly.

The Solo Album is a peculiar pop institution. Making one makes perfect sense for band members who are attention-starved in terms of the stage/media spotlight and who don’t get enough creative input. You can see why John Entwhistle, for instance, recorded four solo LPs between 1971 and ’75. But what about the Pete Townsend types, the de facto band leaders whose aesthetic vision dominates? Why do they feel the need to strike out on their own? Trailed with a press statement terse and low-key almost to the point of being cagey, The Eraser offers scant indication as to Thom Yorke’s motivations for this solitary excursion. It’s not like the album represents a detour from the Radiohead path into vastly unfamiliar territory. Essentially, it’s an extension to the Radiohead house of sound: less majestic, perhaps, with a half-finished and rough-around-the-edges demo-like feel. But you could easily hear it as seventh Radiohead album, even though only Yorke and longstanding producer Nigel Godrich are involved.

Solo albums emerged as a phenomenon in the dying days of the 1960s, mirroring the fractured feel of the times: bands splitting up or losing focus in a welter of side projects. Arriving at a similarly entropic moment in rock history, The Eraser’s downbeat mood flashes back to that same era of self-absorbed singer-songwriters and troubled troubadours. Sonically it collides a certain style of post-psychedelic soft-rock with textures and rhythms drawn from across the span of Nineties electronica. So the ghosts of Roy Harper, Shawn Philips, Tim Buckley, Nick Drake, Richard Thompson, jostle with glitchy clicks and blippy blurts straight out of the Aphex Twin/Autechre/Boards of Canada vocabulary.

Out of all those minstrels, Harper is the closest analogy, because for much of The Eraser Yorke plays the part of jeremiah, scowlingly surveying a world fucked up beyond all repair. Throughout the album there’s moments when a Yorke moan-tone uncannily resembles Harper’s folk-blues cadences; the layered wordless harmonies of “Cymbal Rush” recall the multitracked vocal lattices on Stormcock’s’ “The Same Old Rock” while the glistening blistered guitar riff on “Black Swan” could be straight off that album’s “One Man Rock and Roll Band”. The most instantly powerful song on the album, “Black Swan” kicks off its panorama of political-is-deeply-personal despair with a vague gesture at escape (“do yourself a favour and pack your bags/buy a ticket and get on a train”), proceeds through imagery of powerlessness (“people get crushed like biscuit crumbs) and pointlessness (“you cannot kickstart a dead horse/you just crush yourself and walk away”), before going out on a ringing note of non-catharsis with the chorus “this is fucked up/fucked up/we are black swans/ and for spare parts, we’ll be broken up.” Likewise sounding a note of ecological and geopolitical doom, “The Clock” entreats the world to wake up because “time is running out.” Propelled by a tripping-over-itself beat partially built out of fingerclicks, gasps, and vocal noises, “The Clock” isn’t really a protest song, though. It’s too disempowered, too prone, to actually claw its way up onto the soapbox of denunciation.

“Analyse” conjures a mood of washed-up/washed-out dejection and pastel-toned passivity that recalls a little-known early Pink Floyd B-side called “Paintbox.” With its imagery of anomie and mental disarray--“sentences that do not rhyme… fences that you cannot climb”--and its mewling chorus of “its gets you down,” the song would slump into a marshmallow slough of supine numbness altogether if not for its kickin’ beat (not so much jungle as privet hedge). The title track, opening the album, is fey and faint to the point of fading away altogether. Imagine Andrew Gold’s “Lonely Boy” fused with The Cure’s “All Cats Are Grey” and remixed by Royskopp (a subdued, miniaturized version of a classic rave riff, staccato and Morse Code-like, materialises towards the end). The lyric seems to bear an inverted relationship to “How to Disappear Completely” off Kid A: “the more you try to erase me/the more, the more, the more that I appear.”

What makes The Eraser great is Yorke’s singing--for all the well-executed electronics and tasty guitar-work, his voice is by far the most arresting instrument on the record (and occasionally the most avant-garde too), proving yet again that he’s the Miles Davis of mope-rock, the maestro of a thousand exquisitely subtle shades of blue. What makes the album grate, though, are Yorke’s lyrics, not because they’re bad but because they’re so unrelievedly monotone and monochrome. There’s a single moment of pure joy: “Atoms for Peace”, a love-alone-can-banish-the-shadows song, Yorke’s voice all hovering tenderness and grace as he vows “no more going to the darkside” and pleads “peel off all your layers/I want to eat your artichoke heart… take me in your arms.”

After this Vespertine-like epiphany of intimacy, it’s straight back into the black with “And It Rained All Night”: musically impressive (it practically invents a new genre, electro-blues), but otherwise oppressive in its gloom (rain here figures not as a cleansing, redemptive force, but a pitiless elemental battering, ““relentless” and “indefatigable”). The wilting, eroded synth on “Harrowdown Hill” recalls Joy Division’s “Decades”, the closing track on Closer, the one about the young men with the weight of the world on their shoulder. Yorke’s imagery is Curtis-like too, alluding to pressure beyond withstanding and “slippery, slippery slopes”. “Cymbal Rush” is a song sonically divided against itself, the superfast bassline (which resembles a just-held-in-check panic attack) opposed by glutinous washes of gloomy synth teleported from Side Two of Bowie’s Low. The last song on The Eraser, it seemingly represents a low point of absolute existential prostration, Yorke barely managing to enunciate his imagery of retreat ( “try to build a wall that is high enough”) and futility. Finally the song picks up energy (the cymbals of the title appear) as if trying to make a break(beat) for it, only to sputter out abruptly.

So, The Eraser: a great slab of experimental misery, a document of quiet desperation and uncomfortable numbness. Strangely, it’s a record that’s easy to love, but hard to admire.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

There’s no point in revisiting The Stooges’ first two albums as monuments in rock’s heritage landscape. This music demands to be taken purely as a now-thing: a dynamo coiled with electric essence, something you can use to recharge your existence today, tomorrow, forever. So let’s bypass history and context as much as possible and instead get under the skin of the Stooges music. Let’s skip the facts and aim for truth--what this sound feels like as a drama of energy.

Which means talking about cocks. You hear an awful lot about “rockism” these days, but The Stooges aren’t just rockist, they’re cockist. Like their obvious forebears, The Stones and The Doors, the Stooges surge and swing with a particular phallic energy. Iggy spells it out in later songs like “Penetration” and “Cock In My Pocket”, but you catch the drift early on, with the debut’s “Real Cool Time” and “I Wanna Be Your Dog”, anthems of penile delinquency. Side One of Fun House is actually structured to mirror the male sexual trajectory, from the predatorial gaze of “Down On the Streets” (Iggy the man-missile cruising for action), through penetration and orgasm (“Loose” and “TV Eye,” the latter climaxing with Iggy’s holler “now ram it”) to the tingling, tristesse-tinged afterglow of “Dirt”. Throughout Iggy wields it like a weapon, but the “it” is less a prong of gristle between his legs than his whole being, engorged with will and burning with lack. One side of The Stooges music incarnates the dream of being perpetually on fire. But there’s a contradictory impulse too, a quest for absolute satiation, the grail of Norman Mailer’s “Apocalyptic Orgasm,” the bliss-blast that will snuff the flames of desire and achieve a deathly serenity.

Side one of The Stooges starts with unrest and restlessness (“1969” contrasts “war across the USA” with the boredom of Iggy as suburban Everykid faced by “another year of nothin’ to do”) but ends with the nirvana trance of “We Will Fall.” Oft-maligned as John Cale-damaged raga-wank, its ten minutes of “Venus In Furs” drones and Buddhist chanting is soporific, true, but that’s the point: Iggy links love with surrender (“I won’t fight… I’ll be weak”), conflates happiness and sleep, and equates sleep with death. Usually Ron Asheton’s wah-wah guitar ejaculates napalm, but on “We Will Fall” it glistens wetly, inky-black ripples in a viscous, slow-motion whirlpool. The same narcotic shimmer reappears on “Ann”, an equally under-celebrated ballad that starts where “End of The Night” by The Doors left off. In a Quaalude-foggy Sinatra-croon, Iggy sings again of love as a detumescence of the spirit: “you took my arm and you broke my will”. Entranced, he’s floating in the amniotic “swimming pools” of his lover’s eyes: “I felt so weak, I felt so blue”. But at the chorus, Iggy’s agonized, somehow humiliated “I looooove you” is unexpectedly completed with the war-cry “RIGHT NOW!!!!”. Amorous lassitude abruptly shifts to aggressive lust; Asheton’s limpid guitar instantly hardens into a rampaging riff. An evil humming rises up from the depths of the mix, and it’s a shock to realize that it’s actually Iggy, a low moan-drone of gaseous malevolence that seems to emanate not from his mouth but from every pore in his body.

The debut, great as it is, feels a little leashed in its energy initially. Towards the end, though, with “Not Right” and “Little Doll,” The Stooges loosen up rhythmically, Scott Asheton’s drums resembling The Troggs-as-free-jazz, Dave Alexander’s bass sidling like a rattlesnake about to strike. It’s as though the band gradually find their groove in preparation for Fun House. If The Stooges is a teenager--randy-fit-to-explode, but still awkward-- there’s a cocksure swagger to Fun House, as though the music’s got conquests under its belt now. The taut on-the-beat drums of “Down on the Street” stomp, as Lester Bangs put it, like a gang clicking its heels on the sidewalk. They’re on the prowl for sweet young thang. Iggy hits the ignition on “Loose” with war-whoops and the warning “LOOK OUT!!,” then gloats “I stuck it/Deep inside”. Later in the song, this chorus sounds closer to “I’m stoopid/Deep inside”--a pretty-vacant boast, perhaps, referencing the Stooges’ ideal of the O-Mind, a paradoxical state of hyper-alert oblivion reached through drugs and noise.

“TV Eye” is The Stooges’ “Whole Lotta Love”. Structurally the songs are almost identical, with a bulldozing prime-evil riff giving way to an eerie ambient-abstract mid-section (where Percy shrieks, Iggy emits subhuman gnashings and whooshing gusts of flamethrower breath). In both songs, there’s a pause of appalled silence before the riff magically re-erects and goes on the warpath once more. Led Zeppelin always came across as overlords, though (which is why they’re heavy metal), whereas the Stooges were obviously underdogs (and therefore punk). You can’t really imagine Zep doing a song like “Dirt,” on which Iggy preaches spiritual education through abasement (“oooh I been hurt… oooh I been dirt/But I don’t care/Cos I’m learning/Inside”), while Asheton rains down silverflicker guitar from the same pained-but-ecstastic place as the intro to “Gimme Shelter”.

Zep were also hippie-boys, but Fun House the album and “Funhouse” the song turn Sixties dreams of generational unity and pleasure-as-insurrection inside out. “We’ve been separated, baby, far too long… Living in division/In the shifting sands,” intones Iggy, beckoning the “baby girls” and “baby boys” into the funhouse. But this “come together” anthem is closer to National Lampoon’s Lemmings than Woodstock, liberation through regression rather than higher states. “Funhouse” is an orgy of debased sound, an electric mudbath mixing primal soup and primal scream (the acrid honk of Steve Mackay’s sax). On this and the preceding “1970”, Iggy keeps screaming “I feel all right” but he doesn’t sound it; he seems wracked by the pleasure grind. The final “LA Blues” reaches the howling void at the heart of hedonism. It’s a spasm of writhing feedback, freeform sax, and Iggy throat-noise, a glimpse ahead to Metal Machine Music and “Radio Ethiopia,” as well as 1000 long-hair retro-bands in the late Eighties lamely leaning guitars against amps and exiting the stage to a wall of screech.

I almost forgot: each of these glorious-sounding reissues comes with a bonus CD (“Deluxe” isn’t exactly a Stooges word, is it?) of alternate takes. The Fun House disc sifts the “cream” from that absurd, fan-fleecing seven-CD Fun House sessions box, but The Stooges disc is all hitherto unreleased, the peach being an “Ann” twice as long as the album version. Everything is worth hearing if only to note just how tight the Stooges were, how honed their on-the-surface sloppy frenzy actually was (in other words, the takes don’t vary that much). In the end, though, they’re superfluous because without exception the definitive version is the one that made the final cut. SIMON REYNOLDS

INTERVIEW WITH RON ASHETON

SR: The Stooges sold spectacularly small amounts compared to the MegaBands of their day. But it’s hard to imagine Blood, Sweat & Tears, say, being able to reform and tour the world, like The Stooges have done. Do you feel vindicated?

RA: I don’t feel a revenge, I just feel grateful. My brother Scott and I always hoped the band would get it together again. We weren’t commercially successful at the time, but I guess over the years other groups would mention us an influence, and people would pick up on that, and it just built. I turned on a “classic rock” radio station recently and the voiceover said, “next we’ll be playing Led Zeppelin and Stooges”. It wasn’t like that back in the day! With reforming, I’m really just enjoying hanging with my friends. It’s great touring now, because it’s like a family vacation. We’re not scrambling looking for women or a party. We go sightseeing, check out the aquarium in Lisbon!

Although Sixties garage bands like Count Five may have the prior claim, The Stooges are generally regarded as the dawn of punk rock. Historians often talk about how you guys hated “love beads” and flower power. Were you really anti-hippie or did you participate a bit in the Summer of Love?

Some of it was kinda corny. But we didn’t have any great animosity towards hippies. We certainly had a lot of sex with hippie women! And we listened to the San Francisco bands. It could get a little too earthy and pious. But there was a great divide in America and we were on the same side as the hippies. You don’t shit on an ally! The difference was, some hippies were so anti-war they were anti-soldiers, calling them baby-killers. We hated the Vietnam war but we supported the soldiers. We said, ‘they’re your age and our age; they’re us’.

Indeed Detroit rock has this cult of the military, from MC5 and their whole White Panther/ “guitar army” shtick to the running thread of ballistic imagery in Iggy’s lyrics.

I wrote a song with Deniz Tek of Radio Birdman called “Rock’n’Roll Soldiers”. I always felt that being in a band was a military operation. You get your transport to the area and you carry out the mission. I’m like the medic on our tour, I’ve got all the vitamins, the sinutis pills, the anti-diarrhoea medicine! When we play London this year I’m looking forward to visiting the Imperial War Museum. I used to go there all the time when we lived there, recording Raw Power. There’s all these things that aren’t on display that you can only see on appointment--like Herman Goering’s uniform. I’d put my name down but never managed to see them. Maybe this time.

Monday, July 16, 2007

Jane's Addiction are "metal" in the same way that My Bloody Valentine are "Sixties-influenced indiepop". It's approximately one billionth of the story. To say that they "transcend the genre", is as miserly an understatement as describing Mary Margaret O'Hara as "an idiosyncratic but accomplished singer" or Prince as a "mixed-up narcissist."

Where 99.9% of 'metal' rocks out along a straight and narrow axis, Jane's Addiction rock out in 360 degrees and five dimensions.They don't kick ass so much as torch ass. There's a strange exultation that bursts the bounds of the 'material'. Where the last album, "Nothing Shocking" only reached flashover with "Up The Beach", "Ocean Size" and the one about pissing in the shower,"Ritual De Lo Habitual" delivers on that incandescent promise about sevenfold.

It's strange that Jane's Addiction are such sleaze bags, so immuredin decadence and degradation, because their music is about as lofty,cleansing, sublimated and sublime as rock'n'roll gets. Part of it is down to Perry Farrell's peculiarly ethereal presence. His voice is a fleshless, evengenderless peal of petulance, like a bad-ass Tinkerbell. Strictly speaking,he can't sing - but that raises him a couple of infinities abovethe beefcake competence of the Heavy Metal norm. Farrell sounds like a creature.

But what truly elevates Jane's Addiction is David Navarro's golden horde of guitars. Think of all the moments in metal that momentarily step outside the dim strictures and bawdy boorishness of the genre, passages and peaks when the form achieves an abstract splendour. Jane's Addiction are like that all the waythrough. Navarro's playing is as much to do with Television, with the iridescent spasms of "Marquee Moon", as with the more obvious Led Zep lineage. When Navarro solos it's like a geyser gushing electric eels. This is rock as the Tivoli fountain gardens, rock as the Rocky Mountains.

Ritual De Lo Habitual starts with "Stop" ("here we go!/Nowhere!"), which slips and slides between funk metal and lumbering cosmic boogie, bass like the solar system turning on its axis. And then it's pyrotechnics and prayers on fire allthe way. Jane's Addiction's only let up, their solitary lapse into levity, is the one minute snatch of Ian Dury's "Sex & Drugs", which they cover as deep, daft dub, Farrell essaying a Rasta accent. "Obvious", though, starts out as astral reggae for real, straying close to A.R. Kane territory. And "Been Caught Stealin'", by some uncanny and presumably innocent coincidence, hits upon a near- identical groove to Happy Mondays' "Wrote For Luck": it's funk undercarriage is almost baggy!

But the second side of Ritual is about as timeless and un-topical as you could hope for. "Three Days" is gloriously misguided choice for a single, lasting as it does a small eternity, going through about five drastic changes of course and covering all the ground between the Cocteau Twins and Blue Oyster Cult. "Then She" is an awesomely queer art-rock ballad draped with Beatles-ly strings, lachyrmose trickles of piano and quicksilver slivers of guitar. "Of Course" sustains the baroque, apocalyptic ambience with its piquant Arabic/Balkan fiddles. The closing "Classic Girl" is the album's solitary foray into unadulterated lyricism. But you're reluctant to let yourself swoon, as it's seems more than likely that something pretty rancid lurks beneath the romanticism.

Jane's Addiction are The Associates of heavy rock, and Ritual De Lo Habitual is their Sulk, a pinnacle of purple hysteria. Sheer alchemical intoxication. Ritual is as overloaded, over-reaching, injudicious and "pretentious" as rock should be in 1990. Words like "mellow", "good vibes" , "ordinary Joe" and "casual" do not figure in their vocabulary. The "ponceyness" * is back, with a vengeance. All hail.

SIMON REYNOLDS

* reference to interview in recent issue of MM with Madchester makeweights Paris Angels, in which one of the band opined that what was good about baggy was that "the ponceyness is gone, it's the ordinary Joe onstage again".

Monday, July 9, 2007

VARIOUS, Glam Rock 2 (Virgin Music Video)Melody Maker, 1989

LIKE its predecessor, Glam Rock 2 is a pretty accurate encapsulationof the Seventies glam spectrum: 50 per cent visionary, 50 per cent tawdry. In the latter camp, there's the grotesque Wizzard and their ghastly 'flower power' meets 'pub rock' amalgam, there's the indelibly seedy Teddy Boy revivalism of Mud, and there's Suzi Quatro's amiable but neglibible tomboy raunch. As for the rest - "visionary" really is the only word for music much of which still sounds astonishingly futuristic.

There's the divine Bolan, with rough-and-ready tumbles through "Metal Guru" and "Telegram Sam", plus the corrugated, cosmic boogie of "Children Of The Revolution". There's The Sweet, a band over-ripe for rehabilitation. Glam Rock 2 includes two hits from their twilight days, after their they'd ditched their songwriting mentors Chinn and Chapman, and started recording their own material in a bid to lose the 'tennybop puppet' image. "Fox On The Run" is crammed with hooks, but a little tame compared with the bubblegum apocalypse of "Teenage Rampage" and "Ballroom Blitz". But "Action" is awesome. Released over a year before punk, it anticipates the insurgency of '76 with its sneered, accusatory vocals and streamlined riffs that The Young Gods should be tripping overthemselves to sample. Johnny Rotten apparently liked The Sweet and it may be more than mere fancy to suggest that the chant of "liar liar liar" in the background of "Action" seeped into his unconscious, to reappear in the form of "Liar" on "Never Mind The Bollocks".

Even more uncannily pre-emptive of punk is Alice Cooper's anthem of anti-Messianic megalomania, "Elected". The opening whiplash riff and Alice's soul-shattering scream remain one of the bloodcurdling intros of all time, and if you listen closely during the fade you can hear the boast "and we don't care", a full six years before "Pretty Vacant". The accompanying video of Alice's presidential campaign (the only non-TV studio footage here) is impressively apocalyptic.

The other mindblowing clip is "This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us", by Sparks: their fiercest slice of purple hysteria, bar the possible exception of thelater, Moroder-ised "Beat The Clock". Listening to its swashbuckling dash and falsetto frenzy again, you can see where Billy McKenzie got 50 per cent of his torrid aesthetic from. There's something beyond wacky, truly perverse, about the Mael brothers: the strange chemistry between the fascistic, constipated Ron and the foppish Russell (looking here like a cross between Jim Morrison and Johnny Rotten).

All this and the chance to gawp at Gary Glitter's ill- advised, swansong attempt to revive his career, by switching from stomp rock to Philadelphian orchestral soul ("A Little Boogie Woogie"). Roll on Vol. 3...

Monday, July 2, 2007

SEEFEEL x 3

Seefeel/Main, The Garage, London Melody Maker, summer 1993

'Ambient' has become the buzzword of '93, a term that circulates promiscuously even as it gets ever harder to pin down to a precise meaning. 'Ambient' is now a freefloating signifier, referring to everything from post-Orb 'ambient dub', to the Satie-esque minimalism of The Aphex Twin, to the post-modern bachelor pad muzak of Stereolab. If it means anything, ambient announces a desire to go beyond (the strictures of rock, of rave) into a realm of sensuous spirituality. But even this definition fails to account for the alien and alienated ambience of post-apocalyptic dub- metal explorers like Ice, Scorn, Thomas Koner and Main.

As Main get underway, the bloke next to me lights up a spliff. That’s one meaning of ‘ambient’ for sure: a soundtrack to getting stoned. But Main would seem a most unlikely candidate for that, since their uneasy atmospherics are the antithesis of mellow. Main instill a dread-drenched feeling of impending cataclysm and it’s this aura of arrested apocalypse that is just about the only continuity with Robert Hampson’s previous vehicle, Loop.

In Main, Hampson has ruthlessly purged whatever slight remnants of crowd-pleasing rock’n’roll dynamics still clung to Loop. There’s no “energy” here, in the conventional kick-ass sense, but there is in the form of radioactivity, a malign forcefield penetrating the listener’s flesh. Main’s version of ambience is very distant from Eno’s “healing music” or the Aphex Twin’s soothing bubblebath of analogue synth.

At other times, Main make Metal-Machine-Music, remorseless but impersonal, like Faust expunged of their antic wit and turned into a death factory. One track is like being in a ship’s engine room, all metallic clanking and creaks, hisses and shearings. The final toe-tapper is an awesome experiment in the science of void-ology: a vast, reverberant dronescape, as haunting as a threnody sung by the ghosts of all the whales massacred by Mankind.

Seefeel have a similar mantric methodology to Main, but a totally different effect: purely wombadelic, kissed-out where Main are the kiss of death. If Main prolong the point just before catastrophe, Seefeel expand the point just before orgasm, stretch it out into a thousand plateaux of bliss. A Seefeel song is like an orgasm turned into an environment, a honeycomb space of luminous, globular goo. You feel like you're actually inside the drugged or orgasmic body, a grotto of rushes, tingles, shivers, pangs, spasms.

Only a few months ago, I was bemoaning the dearth of groups exploring blurry blisscapes midway between AR Kane and Aphex Twin. Seefeel are a pipe-dream come true, and the best new band of '93. At times, they suggest a dub-dance odyssey A.R. Kane could have embarked upon after their MARRS track "Anitina". At other times, they're making the music that MBV could have reached if they'd pushed the sampled feedback and looped beats of "Loveless" just a bit further. Seefeel meld dreampop and techno into a swoon-machine. Songs like "Plainsong" and "Time To Find Me" are billowing tapestries of sugar hiccupping, heart-in-mouth euphoria. They make your brain purr, your goosepimples glow. All Seefeel need to do now is to turn their hazy back-projections into a 3D environment, so that the listener is swaddled and swathed in synaesthesia, cocooned in caressing sound-and-vision. SIMON REYNOLDS

SEEFEEL, Quique (Too Pure)Melody Maker, 1994

As titles go Quique lies somewhere between mid-periodCocteaus and Aphex Twin's scientific arcana. Quique isperfectly blank, utterly abstract: it looks nice on the page,feels nice in the mouth, and that's what counts. And as partof the post-rock, post-techno ambient thang, Seefeel are allabout abstraction. Just as the trajectory of abstract artinvolved the liberation of colour from line and figure, sothe trajectory of psychedelia has involved the liberation of"chromatics" (timbre, texture, noise) from the contours ofsong and riff. So if A.R. Kane were late Matisse (oceanicmysticism, blocs of garish colour) and MBV shift betweenaction-painting chaos and Klee naivete, then Seefeel inducethe same kind of serene exaltation of the soul as Rothko'slambent, blurry canvases.

"Climactic Phase No. 3" is Seefeel as we've come toexpect from "Plainsong" and "Time To Find Me": over a foetal-heartbeat bassline, billowing cirrus-swirls (Seefeel'smethodology makes guitars sound like samples, the synth likea choir, and the human voice like a sequencer), weavetogether to form a shimmering outerspace/innerspacewombscape. It's hard to say why some pieces feel likeblissful suspension from reality, while others (theclangorous "Polyfusion") are like watching the proverbialDulux dry. All the tracks are equally uneventful, sifting'n'shifting layers, ending arbitrarily and "inconsequentially".

"Industrious" is almost urgent, it surging bass-drumaxis swathed in striated guitar that hums like massed bomberson the horizon. But the female vocal sounds a tad toomonastic (at times Seefeel lapse into being a mere techno-conscious Slowdive). Then a track like "Imperial" follows tochase away all reservations: squiggle-shivers of iridescencebraid together to conjure a prolonged mind-spasm, like thebrain being flooded with endorphins. Pillowy, heaven-scented, soft as snow but warm inside, "Plainsong"demonstrates Seefeel's art of turning a pinnacle into aplateau. "Charlotts Mouth" also aches, but with anguish notecstasy. Desolate dub bass, forlorn girl-vox, gently weepingguitar: this is almost the blues they're oozing, but A.R.Kane style (harrowed by the terror of beauty, the waypossession can be pierced through by the presentiment ofloss). "Through You" is like Aphex in alien mode: strangerubbery squeaks and glassy clinks offset by portentous crestsof sound building to a pitch of mournful majesty.

The last two tracks show Seefeel stretching out fromtheir own formula, and that's a good augury. On "FilterDub", the way different threads (frayed guitar, lovesickwhalesong etc) twine together, hitting a harmonic G-Spotevery couple of bars, is like doowop orchestrated by drone-meister Terry Riley. "Signals" is Seefeel at their mostradical and radiant. Fuzzy harmonics, like a harp playedunderwater, simply hang tremulously in the air: this reallyis Rothko'n'roll.

Seefeel sometimes need a bit more space in their sound,a bit of emptiness to punctuate the drone-swarm. Like MBV onLoveless, they're sometimes so blissed it's suffocating,like drowning in mother's milk. But overall, Quique isconsummate, a blanched canvas for the imagination, and acracking debut.

SIMON REYNOLDS

SEEFEEL, Quique (Caroline)Spin, 1994

Whatever happened to 'dreampop'? Well, the smartest of those bands have turned onto techno, and are mixing their their lustrous guitarstuff with sampled pulses and sequenced hypno-rhythms. My Bloody Valentine showed the way with 1991's Loveless, on which they looped their basslines and sampled their own feedback. The best of the new techno- affiliated dreampopsters, Seefeel, have struck a sublime groove midway between MBV's sensual tumult and Aphex Twin's ambient serenity.

Listening to Seefeel's billowing tapestry of textures, it's hard to distinguish between the looped samples, treated guitars, and breathy, non-verbal murmurs (vocalist Su Page is just another 'instrument'). Under this caressing canopy of sound, there's a dub-influenced rhythm matrix of foetal- hearbeat bass and percolating percussion. But at their most radical, Seefeel abandon songs and beats altogether, leaving a dyslexic shimmer of radiance that's like a musical equivalent to Op Art. With "Imperial" and the purely ambient "Signals", you try to squint your ear in order to bring the music into focus, then give up, and just bask in the gorgeous, amorphous glow.

Seefeel make a sound like the pleasant ache of a post- orgasmic brain, like the dizzy drone-swarm of butterflies in the stomach. Quique should be subtitled: "Songs For Swooning Lovers".SIMON REYNOLDS

The Melody Maker Quique review and the live review with Main appear in the sleevenotes to the album's two-CD reissue as Quique: Redux Edition , highly recommended

It's clear now that Loop peaked with their magnificentbrace of EP's in 1988, "Collision/Thief Of Fire" and "BlackSun/Mother Sky". '89's Fade Out was just a consolidation ofthe first album (some would say, a reiteration). And lastmonth's drab, ungainly "Arc-Lite" obviously heralded theproverbial 'traumatic third album'. Here it is.

The title, A Gilded Eternity is at once perfect andpredictable: it actually sounds like one of the morecumbersome metaphors dreamt up by we here at the MM branch ofthe Loop Fan Club. A Gilded Eternity is another gesture atwhat Loop were aiming at with the phrase "heaven's end".Heaven is an "endless end" to the anxiety and restlessness offleshly existence. The 'apocalypse now' that Loop, theSpacemen and their ilk yearn for is an end of history and anend of geography: an escape from the shackles of time andplace. Some radical psychoanalysts believe that it'sTime itself that is the source of Man's alienation.

A Gilded Eternity also suggests to me what Loop shouldbe doing musically. By now, they should have transcended theriff, transcended rhythm, and disappeared in a nebula oforiginless sound. Their black energy should have turned tolustrous entropy. They should have reached the nirvana of"heaven's end". We've seen glimpses of this sublimated meta-rock before, in the coda to "Forever" (off the first LP) andwith "Circle Grave" (off the "Black Sun" EP): dislocateddrones that circle each other endlessly, like gravity ripplesround a black hole.

New songs like "Vapour" and "Afterglow" seem to promisethe final coming of this rock afterlife. But put the needlein the groove, and it's instantly clear that Loop are stillstuck in the garage. Only this time round they've lost thegargantuan, irresistible momentum of yore. Their riffs nolonger sound primordial so much as underdeveloped. Where onceLoop were about going nowhere vast, now they just seem togoing nowhere. With "Nail Will Burn" they even get there,only to find it's like the area between East Croydon andSelhurst. And "Breathe Into Me" trundles grey like Red LorryYellow Lorry, of all people.

There's a couple of tracks on A Gilded Eternity whereLoop get beyond themselves. "Blood" is a brilliant dub-scapeclearly influenced by Mark Stewart: a radioactive wasteland,dust-plumes of Can guitar, and static crackle vocals likeMayday signals from survivors trapped beneath the glowingrubble. "From Centre To Wave" is v. Joy Division: glazedbass drones and slash afer slash of guitar, superimposed intoa glare of sound. Blinding stuff.

The closing "Be Here Now" is the best excursion herethrough Loop's traditional terrain. Magnificently pregnant,impending chords are repeated for what feels like an eternity(not quite a gilded one) before the entrance of Robert'slistless vocal. The verses alternate just a bit too neatlywith an absolutely beautiful solo, which rears up to raze theupper echelons of the sky in identical fashion on each of itsappearances. The song finally blazes true just before theend. But at nearly 10 minutes, "Be Here Now" sounds like asketch for a really overwhelming track.

A Gilded Eternity, then, is a disappointment. Loop areletting themselves, and us, down. Better to have riskedreinventing themselves (even at the cost of producing adisaster of indulgence), than to give us more of the same,only less so.SIMON REYNOLDS

Kirsty Yates and Julian Tardo used to be 2/3 of Earwig, whose '92LP Under My Skin I Am Laughing was correctly hailed (by me) as"one of the debuts of the year" . Now the pair are 100% of Insides(they changed the name 'cos they got sick of people harping on abouthow silly and diminuitive 'Earwig' was). Having signed to 4AD,they're about to release their second 'debut', entitled Euphoria,and this time I correctly hail it as one of the albums of the year.

Where Under My Skin was lo-budget and homespun, Euphoriahas 4AD's customary gloss: it's easy glistening music, somewherebetween Prefab Sprout's oblique elegance and the mosaic intricacy ofPapa Sprain. But if Insides have any real peers, they belong in thatlo-fi but non-Luddite zone of post-rock/post-techno experimentalismthat encompasses Disco Inferno, Seefeel, Aphex et al. Basically,Insides make delectable non-retro pop (as opposed to the delectableretro pop of, say, Teenage Fanclub). But all that should reallyconcern you is the word 'delectable'.

Julian (his official nomenclature on the sleeve is J. SergeTardo, but fuck that) and Kirsty aren't just a duo, they're acouple too. For a while last year, they weren't: Euphoria is inpart the document of the emotional carnage, placing it in theillustrious tradition of inter-band heartbreak albums that includesFleetwood Mac's Rumours and Richard & Linda Thompson's Shoot OutThe Lights. The pair met at university in Brighton, where theycurrently subsist on the dole. They lead a hermit-like existence,having little reason to venture outside their flat/arts-lab, wherethey make music and films. All their "gizmos" are at one end of theroom, and the TV is at the other: they're creative all day, then,says Kirsty, "come 6 o'clock it's television lockdown".

Although Brighton is a veritable rock'n'roll city (inhabitantsinclude Primal Scream, some of Huggy Bear, Coco Steel & Lovebomb,and, erm, Norman Cook), Insides say they have little in the way of asupportive milieu of arty-minded kindred spirits, apart from somefriends who are loosely connected to the Riot Grrrl thang. Thenagain, Insides aren't exactly rock'n'roll. Like the post-rock/post-rave ambient units, Insides' music is built up through layers ratherthan jamming: it's a 'musaic' of sequenced motifs, over which Kirstywhispers her unsettling lyrics. Most of their sound-web is sampled(from self-generated noises as opposed to other people's records)then played on a keyboard.

As it happens, Julian is a very able guitarist: his tantalisingVini Reilly-esque filigree is one of the most exquisitely poignantthreads in the Insides tapestry. I reckon Mary Margaret O'Harashould give Michael Brooks the heave-ho and hire Julian to play onher bloody-long-time a'comin' sequel to Miss America. Julian isavailable for session work, but interested parties beware, he saysthe greatest influence on his playing is Kraftwerk!

Another non-rock aspect to Insides is their lack of a drivingbackbeat: their programmed drums are more like decorative threads,embroidery that stitches all the layers together. Are they nevertempted to ditch the beat completely, go totally vaporous?

"We're working on something now that hasn't got a beat," saysJulian. "Almost a classical composition. But it takes a while todisentangle yourself from the old way of doing things. Earwig hadall these askew, off-centre rhythms, but I quite like doingsomething obvious every so often, like this new song that's got afat disco beat. We're really influenced by disco, Sister Sledge andChic. With Cubase, the progamme we write songs on, I can just sticka weird beat like 7/8 in really easily, so it loses its novelty.It's not really that avant-garde cos it's within anyone's reach."

"Anyway, we're not interested in being experimental ordifficult," says Kirsty with some emphasis. "I see 'Euphoria' asthis Astrid Gilberto thing, or even like the Bjork album: somethingpleasant, something nice."

That said, Insides could never be soothing mood-muzak, becauseKirsty's tenterhook singing and barbed words are too edgy (it's alsowhy they don't really fit with the ambient thing). "Darling Effect"has a real sit-up-and-listen opening: "I hate lovers", declaresKirsty, "I hate the way they go to the bathroom in shifts after theyfuck". It's the lonely lament of someone whose flatmates havebecome a couple, consigning him/her to perpetual gooseberry status.

Insides make 'nervous systems music': while their techniquesand textures parallel the lulling hypno-loops of systems composerslike Philip Glass and Michael Nyman, their aura is agitated, andthat's very much down to Kirsty, a rather nervous character.

"I suppose I am," she admits. "Although sometimes my voiceshakes in the studio cos I'm really hungry! But sometimes I can'tbelieve that we get onstage, without drinking. After playing at theICA, I was sick the next morning - delayed nerves. I don't thinkI'm chronically nervous, I do confront it. We're not reclusive coswe're afraid of people, although I don't like walking past crowds. Idon't fear living or anything like that."

I tell her how the imagery in "Bent Double" of close friendsrubbing her back reminded of how angst-queen PJ Harvey has to take astress-management therapist on tour.

"We could do with a stress-therapist. Julian's got this lump onhis neck, where the muscles are knotted with trapped tension."

The self-consciousness of Kirsty's vinyl persona seems vaguelyconnected to Insides' intellectual self-consciousness. Julian usedto put out the excellent, hyper-theoretical fanzine Rapture,before deciding to concentrate on making music rather thancomplaining about the state-of-rock.

"Although we talk about ideas a lot, it doesn't affect themusic," he says. "We're not one of those bands who consciouslyassemble themselves or who have policy decisions like 'we want toget into dub'. We don't talk about what we want to sound like, it'smore a checklist of what we DON'T want to sound like."

I used to believe that the best music was made by instinct-driven, non-reflective types; that British hyper-awareness was acurse. But right now, the most interesting music is coming fromveritable brainboxes, like Stereolab - bands who have bags of ideas,but don't inevitably make premeditated, stillborn music. The maineffect of Insides' cerebral tendencies seems to have been that it'sallowed them to think their way through the NOISE = INTENSITY mind-fix ("noise is so white male middle class - go work in a factory andyou'll find out there's nothing radical about noise", argues Kirsty)and embrace the idea that quiet, gentle music can be even moreunnerving. Not only are they unabashed Prefab fans, they also givetheir songs working titles like "Don Henley" (the song in question,"Darling Effect" reminded them of the classic "Boys Of Summer") and"Chris Rea". One song's official title on the album is actually"Carly Simon"! So are Insides making futuristic soft-rock?

"We have this theory," says Julian. "that if you work on a songtoo long, it'll either turn 'brown' (the colour, like a recipe gonewrong) or turn into Fleetwood Mac. All roads lead to Fleetwood Mac,so you should step off just before you get there!"

So you don't actually want to have a totally emollient effecton the listener?

"I'd like them to swoon first, and then throw up! Or feel thatrising, heady sensation you get when they give you anaesthetic atthe dentists, and then the next minute you realise you're covered inblood."

Insides, Kirsty says, want to rescue songcraft from "bands likeSuede and Radiohead who believe that 70's style songwriting is whatit's all about". They're avant-tunesmiths. They're not interestedin extremism, because too many full-on noise records are initiallyimpressive but somehow you never return to them.

"That's what I look for in music," says Julian. "That it drawsyou back to it again and again."

That Don Henley factor!

"Not exactly, but it should make you gag to hear it again andagain, but never get any closer to understanding why you like it".